It is no secret that facial recognition technology is on the rise with amazing leaps forward in efficiency, nor is it a secret that the federal government maintains a centralized biometric database.

This program is so massive and coordinated that even governors have been overridden in the federal government’s quest to create a comprehensive database.

Now police departments across the entire United States will receive facial recognition software developed by none other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The software, known as “Universal Face Workstation software,” will be provided to police departments free of charge by the FBI under the expanding pilot program.

The software allows local law enforcement agencies to compare their photographs with those of the FBI’s database, which the FBI expects will contain at least 12 million photographs by 2014.
One of the many troubling aspects of this technology is the fact that the results are sent back to the querying state or local agency automatically without any human having to check the results.

This means that wildly inaccurate results could be returned to the local agency, which would not be anything new for facial recognition technology.

Michigan was the first American state to get brought into the FBI’s pilot project earlier this year while five other states have already signed up.